CSE LOOKS OUTSIDE IRELAND FOR REVENUES

By Che Golden

The Centre for Software Engineering is looking outside Ireland to increase revenues over the next five years. The centre has already set up a relationship with China and the first group of IT professionals from China have embarked on CSE's six month Advanced Software Engineering Programme. The centre has been developing a similar relationship in Iran, where it is focusing on research and development training with technical managers based in both countries. The CSE is currently talking to three other countries about similar training programmes.

Relationships are the key to CSE's growth, according to its new CEO, Michael O'Duffy, who took over earlier this year. 'We want to be doing serious business outside Ireland and we want half of our revenue to be outside of Ireland in the next three years,' he told IT's Monday. 'We have a strong relationship with Enterprise Ireland, which is important to get our business plan going and we are also revisiting relationships closer to home within Dublin City University, particularly the Computer School and the Business School. We are also developing a relationship with Invent, DCU's incubator centre, particularly with the managers in there.'

However, O'Duffy refused to give targets for revenue or outline the business plan in more detail, claiming much of it was still under discussion. All this is part of an effort to make the CSE more market focused and, in his words, to make it think more like its client companies.

'We want to make the environment at the CSE more commercial,' he said. 'In the past our main concern was on running training courses. Now the emphasis is more on working with individual companies.'

Part of this shift in attitude is a greater commitment within the centre to working with start-ups. While the CSE still works with multinationals, the amount of revenue coming from this sector has declined by 10 per cent to 30 per cent of the total as the CSE refocuses on start-up companies.

Despite the downturn, O'Duffy is seeing an enormous amount of start-ups. According to his figures the IDA received 500 enquiries for funding last year alone.

'There are a lot of good ideas and talented people around at the moment,' he said. 'The problem that they have is funding, which is nigh on impossible to get. Venture capitalists are now demanding companies have a product and a customer base, which is hard for companies to achieve on their own resources. But with the downturn many people coming to us now for help are funding themselves with redundancy pay and the amount of start-ups is increasing because there are often few staff alternatives for talented software people. A big area for us is product design. We are helping companies develop a sound base for their products so that when they are ready to go to market they have something that is robust, good quality and customisable.'

Despite the recent doom and gloom, O'Duffy claimed Ireland's software industry is reaching maturity. He pointed out that more than half of the start-ups formed in the last five years have been breakaways from Irish companies. The next sign of maturity, he said, will be to see a greater number of companies coming out of the universities and the number of university-based start-ups in incubators is building, which will give the sector a major boost as these companies will have what most start-ups do not - a grounding in research.

But while the emphasis is swinging back to product and small companies in the CSE, O'Duffy still claims that services has a vital role to play in developing a strong indigenous sector as well as an important part of the success of the CSE.

'Product will not be enough to keep the sector healthy, nor will it protect it from outsourcing,' he said. 'It is possible to have a services industry that does not do the mundane stuff but offers a unique, value added service. Ideally, a strong services industry would have a high industry domain application knowledge and a good research base to help client companies develop their strategic position. But that demands a very different type of organisation to what we typically have now. It will not be defined by business processes or ISO certification but by having good business people. There is not much point offering services for the telecoms industry if no one in the organisation understands the telecoms business.'

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